The Lily of the Valley
by Holiday Thorne
Summary: When professional psychologist Alice White died of a sudden and fierce bout of lung cancer, she never expected to be reborn, and especially not into the Naruto universe. But now she can change things, and she most certainly will. (Partial SI!OC/multiple people, readers decide ending pairing, rated T to be safe)
1. Part 1: Planting

**Full description:** _ **"Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn." ― Mahatma Gandhi  
**_ **I never expected for there to be another life, another chance, lying in wait for me after I died - I never believed in the idea of reincarnation, though my parents were both hard-core Buddhists. I never agreed with them on the idea of there being life after death; I was a psychologist, a scientist - I wasn't supposed to believe in the mystical. Imagine my surprise when I was proven wrong in the worst way possible, in my opinion.  
When professional psychologist Alice White died of a sudden and fierce bout of lung cancer, she never expected to wake up again, and she most certainly did not expect to wake up as an infant in its mother's womb. She didn't expect to be born again and remember everything, and out of everything she hadn't expected, the one thing she expected the least was to be reborn into the Naruto universe.**

 **So I read a bunch of fanfiction about an otaku being reborn into the Naruto-verse, and I was like, "Hey! That looks like fun; might as well try my hand!" Well, I started brainstorming, and as such Alice White/Sayuri Kita was born. I hope you like her and enjoy her story, much like I enjoyed writing it. :)**

 **Disclaimer: Holiday Thorne here! I'm sure you know the drill, but I'm legally (and morally) obligated to inform you: I do not own the rights to _Naruto_. However, Sayuri Kita/Alice White is mine, along with the changes that I make to canon ('cause shhmrh, canon is depressingly sad); if you take her, or try to copy her, I shall bring the wrath of mine Hell down upon thine head, with the birth-right that is mine since I am the daughter of Satan (just kidding, but seriously, please don't).**

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 ** _The Lily of the Valley_**

 **Part 1  
 _Planting_**

 ** _"Always do your best; what you plant now, you will harvest later."  
― Og Mandino  
_**


	2. Prologue: One Seed out of a Thousand

**Welcome to the Prologue of Alice White/Sayuri Kita's story; I hope you guys enjoy! :)**

 **NatNicole: Thanks for the compliment! I really hope _The Lily of the Valley_ lives up to your expectations. :)  
DarkDust27: Thank you! Here's what you requested; hope you enjoy it! :)  
KumorikoKumoriko: Not in the 'Part 1, 2, 3, etc, etc.' This is where the actual writing begins; I hope you enjoy it.  
ishdirections: I apologize for confusing you and not making things clear; there is only one SI - Alice and Sayuri are the same person, just in two different worlds.**

 **Warning: Alice/Sayuri have a bit of a potty mouth, so beware if you don't like a bit of cussing.**

 **Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ ; Kishimoto-sensei said something about me turning _Naruto_ into a plotless harem of love and something like that (I don't know; I don't speak Japanese that well [lol]) if I had the rights to it, so he refused. Oh, well; it's probably for the better - I'm not all that great of an artist; my skill lies mainly in eyes and female faces.**

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 _ **The Lily of the Valley**_

 **Prologue  
 _One Seed out of a Thousand_**

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 _"There is no death, only a change of worlds."  
― Chief Seattle_

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REINCARNATION was always idiotic to me.

The idea that life would go on after death always seemed idealistic and overly hopeful, like a child believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Someone who was afraid of the thought that there is nothing after death but death itself created a fantasy in which dying is not the final end, and those who agreed with him just went along with it and spread the ridiculous fantasy about the world.

Though I majored in psychology in college, and I have worked as a psychologist to the good people of New York City for most of the years that I have spent alive, I cannot understand the fear of the thought of there being nothing after dying by death itself.

The fear of death itself, on the other hand? Such a phobia I can understand; it is ingrained into our being. It is an instinct and need for survival that nature itself has created in our minds in order to keep us alive and in such a state that we are able to reproduce, thus furthering the genetic chain and ensuring the survival of the species. The manipulation of evolution in our biology at its finest.

 _That_ I can understand. The need for the existence of another life in some form after death? I simply don't understand - I literally _cannot_.

I have worked with people who have far stranger phobias - there was one gentleman who I coaxed through a simply debilitating phobia of clowns, and though I thought it was ridiculous, I could still understand his fear; he had had trauma involving a clown as a child that had ruined the make-up wearing entertainers for him for so long. However, with a lot of patience and understanding, I had managed to help him recover enough to attend a carnival and see a few clowns in passing.

However, that's not the point; the point is that I can - and have, and I _do_ \- understand a lot. But try as I might, I cannot understand the appeal of the concept of reincarnation.

My parents, Alexander and Maria White, were both steadfast believers in the ideals of Buddhism, as well as a few of Hinduism; I have no idea which religion they claimed to have actually practiced, but whenever I was asked which religion they followed, I always answered Buddhism.

Anyway, the ideal they believed in most was the idea that after your death you were reincarnated into another life, another form, and sometimes even another world.

They would explain to me exactly how your actions and choices in this life affect the next life that you are given, and that you can only go to the afterlife when your karma is balanced and even, your debt completed and paid in full.

It is an interesting concept, and it's obviously thought out. Whenever my parents began to lecture me on my own karma, I would tune them out, treat it as a fantastical story that I had no interest in hearing, or I would just laugh in their faces.

To my parents' credit, they never got angry with me, and they were never hurt by my blatant disrespect for their religious ideals; instead, they would laugh in that good-natured way of theirs, smile, and ruffle my hair. They would then warn me that karma would come to, for lack of a better term, bite me in the ass, and I would come to regret my actions and behavior.

Well, I have.

I regret not listening to them, taking what they had to say to heart, when I had the chance, because maybe then this would be easier.

I died. I know that for a fact. I _died_.

After months of fighting against the cancer that had popped up in the bottom of my lungs suddenly, months of slowly dying as my body failed me, I had finally succumbed to the tumors that overtook me, taking me by storm.

It was a warm summer afternoon that day, with a gentle downpour of summer rain in the afternoon shower that we always had where I had lived. The sound of the raindrops hitting against the roof of the hospital that I had spent many of my days in echoed in my ears, a comforting foil to the monotone beeping, slow and steady, of the heart monitor I was hooked up to; with the sound of the rain as my lullaby, I fell asleep slowly, and I felt my heart simply . . . _stop_.

The doctors poured into my hospital room quickly, and my parents and younger sibling, who had been visiting me, were soon escorted out of the room, as to not get in the way of the doctors who were trying to bring me back. Needless to say, they failed, and I was pronounced dead on August 19th, 2003, at 6:31 PM.

I know all this because I was there, a floating specter - an observer of sorts.

It was strange, so incredibly strange to be there when I should not be there, when I wasn't supposed to be there. There were no bright tunnels of white light or a choir of angels singing some heavenly chorus or something to accompany my decease; I merely slipped out of my body, the way one slips their hand out of a glove when they're finished using it, and instead of passing on or disappearing, the way I had heard people theorize death was supposed to be, I merely lingered there, a silent observer to the procession of mourning that echoed in the wake of my death.

For some reason, by the will of some god or goddess, I was left in that world, a silent and lonely observer, long enough to watch my parents and sibling mourn me, my family shattered by my death; they had known, I have no doubt, that death was coming for me. After all, there is only a 1% survival rate for people with stage IV lung cancer past five years; by statistics alone, I was fucked, and then there was the fact that the disease had pretty much spread to every part of my body - vital and otherwise.

I estimate that I was a specter, for lack of a better word, for at least three or four months - certainly long enough to see that the world did, in fact, not grieve my passing for long. I mean, sure there were more than a few articles in the local newspaper about the passing of 'a local genius turned psychologist', and my family's life would never be quite the same without me there. But the world was fine; I had made next to no impact upon it, and that was beyond disappointing to me.

It is in the nature of a human being to want to do something, _anything_ with their life - whether the want led them to do good or bad, the want was there, nonetheless.

For years in school, we had learned that we _can_ do something with our lives, we can change the world if only we put our minds to it. Well, I had put my mind to it, and as a certified genius, I certainly had quite the mind to put to a task. And yet . . . I _failed_.

I had not changed the world; I had barely created a footprint upon the surface of our long and lengthy history on the planet. My mark upon the history was more like a spot, a slight and almost unnoticeable blemish that no one was particularly interested in.

And even the small town that I grew up in, the town I had called home for all of my life, forgot me soon enough; my position was filled by the next bright and talented young thing looking to do something good with their life, my parents had another child, my friends got engaged, my sister found herself a boyfriend. The only reminder that I had existed was the small, inconsequential gravestone - one cracked marble headstone among thousands more, and no more special than all the rest.

I do not condemn the people I had known for moving on, leaving their memories of myself at my abandoned grave; it is, after all, one of the only ways to cope with loss - forget.

When it comes to loss, you either forget or you remember, and either way you still have a missing piece of yourself, that whatever you had lost took with them - wherever they had gone. In both situations, you attempt to fill the hole in your heart with other things - another worker, another child, another friend, another person to love.

So I do not condemn them; I understand their need to erase all traces of my presence in their lives. However, that does not change the fact that it hurts; it is painful to know that they want - nay, they _need_ to erase my existence.

After those months had gone by, I began to feel a tugging; it originated from my heart, and the strength of it is absolutely indescribable. I am still surprised to this day that I was able to resist the Pull for so long; I lasted three days before the Pull swept me off of my metaphorical feet and dragged me into the darkness.

There is no way to describe the transition between death and life other than sudden; I went from being dead in the world I had lived in for 20 some years one moment, to being alive in the darkness the next. It was startling, how quickly the change in lives came to me, but I knew that I was alive.

There had been darkness all around me, but now, accompanying that darkness was warmth; when I was a specter, I could feel nothing - I merely observed, a constant watcher and guardian of sorts. But at this point in my long existence, there was a warmth surrounding my form, mostly still and largely inanimate - I could barely move at all, held tightly in invisible bindings; at the most, I could manage slightly kicks with my legs, which felt much too short to be my own. Still, it was movement.

But perhaps the largest indicator of living was the rushing noise that surrounded me, accompanied by a pounding noise. I recognized the sounds easily enough, having caught whispers of the noises before - in my old life; it was the sound of a heart beating, overlaying the rushing of blood inside veins.

I am ashamed to say that I didn't not realize where I was, or what had happened to me - not for a long while. However, in my defense, I did not have much of a consciousness, nor many thoughts. I just kind of . . . _drifted_.

I have no idea how long I spent in the warm darkness, but it was comfortable and peaceful enough - so I didn't really care. However, all good things must come to an end, and in a violent upheaval that was both painful and odd, I was forced out of my safe haven and into a cold, dim place.

My eyes, at the time, were not very developed, as all newborn living beings are in some way, and I could not see the room that I was in, couldn't make out much of anything. The easiest things for me to see were light and darkness, and the contrast between the two.

However, despite my less than stellar vision, I could still see there were large, honestly kind of lumpy figures in the room with me; my other senses were far stronger than my eyesight, and I could both smell and taste the coppery taint of blood - familiar and yet revolting, hear the shrill screaming of an infant ringing in my ears.

With a shocking jolt, I realized in that moment that the screams I was hearing, they were my own. My mind toyed with the idea of reincarnation, rebirth, some other shit like that, but I dismissed it out of hand - that was just crazy.

Then again, I had lingered in the world that I had died in for several months, so, at this point, I'd believe just about anything was possible.

As if to confirm my suspicions, though, one of the lumpy figures, many times larger than myself, scooped me up, cradling me within their arms as if I weighed next to nothing. The position that the strange figure held me in, it was the same way that you would hold a baby.

Vividly startled by my realization, my screaming reached a new level of shrillness, piercing in the same way of that the whine of an injured dog is. I was shifted slightly in the large figure's arms, and a comforting shush began, reminding me in part of the rushing of the blood.

As I was lulled into slumber, it dawned on me that reincarnation was real, and I was now an infant - where, I had absolutely no idea.

Damn, I was probably fucked.

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 **And that's that!**

 **Well, you've met Alice/Sayuri for the first time; I hope you guys like her. She is a bit cynical and all that, but I honestly think that when you learn the human brain as much as she has, you become cynical - even if only a little bit.**

 **You'll find out more about her in the next chapter, and you get to watch her reaction when she realizes that she's in the Naruto universe. Hope you guys can wait.**

 **Question: Favorite Akatsuki member?**

 **See you guys in the next chapter!**


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